Canadian journalist and musician Nardwuar is known for conducting rigorously researched interviews that call back to formative moments in an artist’s career which have often never been previously discussed.
This, along with his offbeat persona and infectious enthusiasm, has made him something of a legend in the music world. In almost every Nardwuar interview, you’ll find something out about an artist that you didn’t already know.
Nardwuar’s latest interview is no exception. Speaking to British electronic artist Fred Again, Nardwuar digs deep into Fred’s background as a musician and producer and reveals some enlightening details about his relationship with Brian Eno, who Fred describes as “my friend and mentor, one of my favourite people on the planet”. In typical Nardwuar fashion, it seems as if he’s spoken to Eno about Fred in advance of the interview - much to Fred’s astonishment.
After Fred and Nardwuar touch on Eno’s fabled work on designing the Windows 95 startup sound, the conversation turns to his use of plugins, and Nardwuar brings up the legacy stock Logic plugin AVerb; this prompts Fred to launch into a story about Eno’s disregard for conventional mixing techniques.
“One of the funniest things about Brian is that he’s beautifully lawless in how he works,” Fred recalls. “Particularly in recording music, there’s a lot of so-called rules. I remember, for example, one time we were working on a song, we’d worked on it for months, looking at all the minutiae and changing things and worrying about that, going back and re-recording snare hits… then we’re like okay, cool, we’re approaching the deadline, we can send this off to mixing.”
Fred describes how he and Eno are both fans of Logic’s legacy plugins, a set of effects from older versions of the DAW that have been officially retired, but remain accessible through a submenu. “There’s about five of them, and they’re really useful. Silver Compressor and AVerb are the ones that he and I use a lot,” Fred says.
“Just before we send [the track] to mixing,” Fred continues, “he dragged in AVerb… he [put the plugin] on the master, not on any single track, like on the whole song." Haphazardly slapping a prominent reverb on the master bus before a final mixdown goes against conventional mixing practice, flooding the entire mix with an effect that would typically be placed on an effects bus which separates the wet signal from the dry signal for further processing. Then again, as Fred reminds us; Eno has never been one to follow the rules.
"He just went ‘oh… much better, much better. We should send it off like this,’" Fred continues. "I was like... what?! That’s the most wild thing I’ve ever seen anyone do - reverb on the master, straight to mix and release it into the world. So yeah – big up AVerb, big up Brian.”
